the old trail which the engineers have
followed, and carried the Union Pacific to its greatest altitude between
the oceans. Far out there among the buttes runs that climbing ridge, yet
it seems so close, so neighborly with the foreshortening of that strange
scenery, that one cannot realize that in its climb it carries the iron
rails still two thousand feet farther aloft. For years we have read of
the Rockies, and is this possible? Do you mean that here, with this
expanse of level prairie before us, we are up among the clouds, so to
speak,--far up on the very backbone of the continent, and that is why,
instead of towering thousands of feet aloft in air, the great
peaks--Long's and Hahn's and Pike's--seem so near us to the south'ard
and no higher at all? Aye, call it prairie level if you will, for
straight to the east it looks as flat as Illinois, but we are standing
six thousand feet higher in air than the highest steeple in Chicago, and
our prairie flat is but the long, long slope of mountain-side that
begins in the Black Hills of Wyoming--back at Cheyenne Pass--and ends at
the forks of the Platte down near Julesburg.

You say it must be up-hill to that ridge that meets the horizon at the
east. Is it? Look over here to our left front, a little to the
northeast. See that tiny lake surrounded by low, wooden buildings, and
approached by the hard, beaten road from the distant town. A pleasure
resort of some kind, judging from the streamers and bright flags about
the place. It stands on a hill, does it not? and the hill has risen
gradually from the west, but slopes abruptly again to the east and south
to the general level. Did you ever see a lake on a hill before? How does
the water get there? Springs? No. Mark that slender rivulet that runs
from far up the ravine at the southwest; it crosses the prairie in the
near distance, and then goes twisting and turning up that apparent slope
until it reaches the little lake on the hill. The outlet, you say? Yes.
From here it certainly looks so, but step forward a few hundred feet and
look at the rivulet, and by all that's marvellous! the water is running
up-hill.

So it certainly seems, but the explanation is simple. The prairie is not
horizontal by any means. It is a gradual but decided slope to the east,
and the top of the little hill two miles away is forty feet lower than
the point on which you stand.

Then how deceptive is the distance! Across the level to the southeast
lies